Cut Both Ways Read online

  “We gotta go do something,” I say.

  “Want to walk around a little?”

  “Yeah.”

  I’m glad he doesn’t want to drive anywhere; not just because of the gas I don’t want to burn up, but because I’m a terrible driver when I’m high. I know, because I’ve tried, and it was fucking scary as hell. It felt like the car wouldn’t move and I was afraid to step on the gas. Later, I realized I’d left the dumb-ass parking brake on the whole time. Never again.

  We walk around the block. I still feel good. The moon is out now and it’s finally dark. I think there might be more stars out here in Oak Prairie. Or maybe it’s my improved glasses prescription. Or I don’t know. Not many people have their outdoor lights on in summer, which doesn’t make sense; it’s not like they can’t afford to, and it’s not like they’re not home. You can see the TV glow through the closed shades, or smell the grill from the backyards, but nothing goes on in the front. Nobody sees us stumbling and kicking rocks and laughing, lugging our Nalgenes of pink wine. Swigging from them too.

  At the park, finally, there are no kids. The kids must all be in bed—their stroller moms brought the hammer down. Or they’re in front of movies in the TV room, like Taylor and Kinney. Now we can own the park, the shitty fucked-up teenagers no one wants around.

  Angus goes on the swings but I can’t. I can’t stand swings even when I’m sober. I drink more wine. Angus jumps off the swing and then goes down the slide. I stand there, watching him. He’s one of those people who gets all hyper when they’re high. Or maybe he’s happy like I am too?

  I sit on the grass, because though the gravel around the play area might keep kids from cracking open their skulls, it feels gritty and gross. Since helping with my dad’s remodeling, all I think about is how to keep my hands clean. How drywall feels when you break it. How sawdust tastes. How my hands are getting worn and hard from pulling nails from buffalo board under the siding. How what I used to think counted as getting “dirty” now means nothing.

  I watch Angus on the slide and the climbing-rope wall and the monkey bars, going hand over hand, his knees clenched up so he can hang properly. Angus is as tall as me, but skinnier.

  “We gotta get your friend out here soon, though,” he calls, going back the way he came on the monkey bars. “It’s kind of getting to be an emergency.”

  “What? Why?”

  Angus is yelling, kind of, but in a funny way, about this thing going on with his bandmates, which is crazy to me, because what they have, it’s hardly a band. I mean, they never do shows. They don’t have their own songs. They barely play anyone else’s songs.

  “Who’s quitting, again?” I ask, gulping more pink wine. “The keyboards guy?”

  “Andrew’s not quitting. He just says he won’t play if we don’t let his girlfriend do bass. But she plays the violin, not the bass. They’re not even the same. And you need a solid bass line, man. You can’t just scramble along.”

  “Right. Yeah.” As if I know what he means!

  But what am I going to talk about instead?

  Almost chopped my thumb off with the Sawzall last week?

  My dad’s drinking again, though just beer now?

  What do you expect from your band, really, if it doesn’t even have a name?

  I can’t be a total dickwad like that. Not to him.

  “Fuck. I’m buzzed,” Angus says, chucking his Nalgene toward me. It lands in the grass and then he plops down beside me.

  “Yeah. Me too.” I lay back on the grass, which is slightly wet, but I don’t care. This summer, I’ve barely bothered to shower or change my clothes unless I’m leaving the house and might maybe see actual girls or whatever. Why bother getting clothes dirty for no reason, you know? Another thing Angus can’t relate to; he’s not a gross slob kind of guy.

  I look at the stars and feel drunk. I think about people in the olden times, washing their clothes. Beating them against rocks in the river, letting them hang out from trees or laundry lines. My mom used to do that, not the river-rock beating, but the laundry-line thing, in our backyard. I’d help her pin clothes up or take them down, when I was littler. Back when I didn’t care about doing chores. Now our backyard is so full of lumber and building supplies and free shit my dad got from who knows where, you couldn’t even hang up anything, even if the line was still there. My dad snapped it after the divorce. We do everything at his Laundromat now.

  Angus’s still talking about Andrew’s girlfriend. About her being an idiot. About her stupid pink hair. About what was the point, even, of dyeing her hair? This girl had been a cheerleader in junior high; who was she fooling that she was some kind of punk badass now that she was going to be a senior? Andrew swallows all this bullshit, Angus says, because she’s fucking him and before that, Andrew’d been a virgin and now sex is making him stupid. Pussy stupid, Angus adds, sitting up over me and grabbing my Nalgene of wine.

  I don’t know Andrew or his weird girlfriend. I have no opinion about either of them.

  I laugh. “Pussy stupid,” I say. “There’s no such thing as that.”

  Though I wish I could get stupid that way! From pussy! It’s pretty much never going to happen. I’m seventeen and I’ve never even kissed a girl. I never do anything cool. I’m shit at girls. I don’t have any money. I wear glasses. I’m boring. In between.

  I’ve liked plenty of girls but they’ve never liked me back. It’s kind of horrible.

  But kind of reasonable too. Because the girls I like are always completely unaware of my liking them. I never tell anyone, not even my friends, when I like a girl. And I never talk or interact with her, either, if I like her. It’s complete top-secret classified information when I like someone.

  “You all right, Will?” Angus asks.

  “Yeah. Drunk, though.”

  I link my fingers together over my head and see Angus looking down at me while slowly coiling his bandanna into the length he likes for tying it up over his forehead to get his hair out of his face. I watch one of his earrings wink from the light over the play area and then his face is one inch from my face and then Angus is kissing my mouth.

  I don’t do anything. For a minute, I don’t move. He puts his mouth all over my mouth. My glasses are smushed between us but it’s not because he’s being pushy. I just feel them, suddenly, this fragile equipment, sitting there on my face. I know I should maybe move them. I can’t make myself move to do that, though.

  The kissing keeps happening. A minute. A minute more. Then it’s longer and I’m doing something back. With my own mouth. And it’s a decent amount of time too, that I’m doing it back. More than a minute. A while.

  I keep thinking, I’m not gay. I’m not gay. But I only think it.

  It keeps going on, the kissing. Our mouths are opening.

  Angus. I’m not gay. I’m not.

  I don’t know why I’m letting him do this. He lifts away from me and it’s like I could stop this but I don’t. I just take off my glasses and hold them in my hand. Angus kisses me again; his breath smells like pink wine and tastes salty, like potato chips. It doesn’t feel bad. It feels okay. And I know he’s gay: Angus. Everyone’s known that, since forever. Since junior high. He’d made a big deal about it, back then, when he wore his goth costume and eyeliner and walked around acting tragic, like the poems he showed me in his journal. Angus had been the reverse of Andrew’s girlfriend: weird back then, and now normal. Though still gay.

  Why am I doing this? Why am I licking Angus’s tongue?

  Our tongues. It’s very weird, that part. I want to see what that looks like, my tongue touching someone else’s tongue. I wish there was some cool way I could casually open my eyes and see it. But I can’t see that great without my glasses. And I don’t want to look at Angus. Angus, who’s been my friend since I was little. Angus, who hated T-ball with me. Angus, who ate so much candy corn one Halloween that he threw up orange bits for hours the next day. Angus, who cried when his cat died; when we buried Felix in h
is mom’s vegetable garden, I cried too.

  Plus, I don’t want to move. I kind of can’t really move. His hand is up in my hair, his fingers running through it. It makes my scalp shiver. My body shiver.

  Then Angus puts his hand on my chest. It isn’t moving around. Just rests there. And I feel trapped under it, though I’m just as big and strong as Angus, probably stronger, actually, if I think about it. Which I don’t, really. Until now. Then his hand slides down my stomach, where I feel a churning of pink wine and all the goddamn food I’d slobbered down and Angus says, into my neck, “You all right? You’re all right, right?”

  Once he says that, I sit up. It’s like something unlocks when he says that, and then I can move. Me sitting up pushes Angus out of position. His hand falls away. I wipe my glasses on the bottom of my T-shirt; they are wet from the grass. When we look at each other, he looks shocked. Like he didn’t realize that I was me. Me, Will, Will Caynes; that it was me, this whole time. His friend. Who is not gay. Not gay. Clearly not.

  My dick isn’t even hard. I mean, not entirely. Not even half hard. About halfway to halfway hard.

  You’re half gay, then.

  “I’m not gay, Angus.”

  A quarter gay.

  “Okay,” he says. Still looking at me all weird, his eyes bright under his bandanna.

  “I’m not. I’m drunk.”

  “Okay,” he repeats. He looks behind him, at the playground. His hands are on his knees. “Sorry. Me too. I’m drunk, I mean. I didn’t . . . I wasn’t thinking. I mean, I get it. I know. I know you’re not.”

  Half hard. Half gay. Quarter gay. Can Angus tell? Does he know? Can you sense that, when you’re gay? Because you have a dick too, and you know how dicks act?

  Angus apologizes more. He’s very slow and deliberate about it. Like he’s waiting for me to tell him to stop. So I finally do.

  “Angus,” I say. “Stop apologizing.”

  “You’re not mad?”

  “No.”

  “You should hit me, Will. You can. If you want.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. Because then you won’t feel weird.”

  I haven’t hit Angus in forever. Not since we were little kids. Hitting him now would be even weirder.

  I paw my hands through the wet grass, ripping up blades of it. My T-shirt is all wet in the back and feels cold and gross. I feel gross. Spinny. High and drunk.

  “I’m not hitting you, Angus. It’s not a big deal.”

  “All right.”

  “I mean, don’t go telling people or anything.”

  “Of course not,” he says, sounding pissy.

  “I’m just saying, you know, I don’t want people to think the wrong thing. Not that it’s wrong, you know? I don’t care if you’re gay. I don’t.”

  “I know.”

  And then he stands up, like he’s mad at me, and we walk back to his house, faster than we’d walked away from it, and we go back into the garage and he starts dicking around with his guitar and we act like everything’s okay. And I feel okay, I guess. Not high as much, a little spinny, but still drunk. Drunk-okay, though.

  It’s like a thing that happened to somebody else. Like it wasn’t me doing that. Like it was just Angus, not me.

  Then he’s nudging me, because I’ve fallen asleep on the sofa.

  “Will,” he says. “Come on.”

  I sit up. Look at him. My eyes water. My mouth is dry.

  “I have to go home.”

  “You can stay here if you want. My mom won’t care.”

  “I gotta go,” I say. I stand up, make a point to appear competent. I’m very slow, but I can walk. I can. I can do this.

  I walk down his driveway. I know he’s behind me, watching me, but I won’t turn around. I won’t. For a minute, I’m kind of wobbling. I think I won’t make it. I wish I was still on the garage couch. But somehow, the wide black sky above me, the stars brighter than before, I get home. My mom’s house is silent. The dishwasher is humming, the light above the stove is on.

  My bedroom at my mom’s is across from Jay’s office. There’s a bathroom right there too; it’s kind of my bathroom, though Jay leaves his magazines and stuff in there. I’m the only one who uses the shower. The medicine chest is full of my stuff. I turn on the light and I pee. I pee for a long time. I pee for a thousand years, swaying while I stand. Listening for signs that my mom’s still awake. The sound of the television. The sound of her own toilet flushing or sink running. But nothing: just the dishwasher hum.

  In my bedroom, I strip off my clothes in a damp heap. Clunk down on the bed, which has a new comforter on it. Maroon with gray trim. My mom bought it a few months ago, for no reason I could see. She just decides something needs to be replaced and does it.

  I take off my glasses and set them on the dresser next to the bed. The bed is soft. The futon at my dad’s is horrible. Here at my mom’s, the bed’s a pillowtop. Plush. Comfortable. Luxurious.

  The room spins for a minute and I shut my eyes until everything’s still. I think I might yack, but I breathe deep for a while and then it goes away and I feel okay.

  “Okay,” I say to myself. The word in the stillness hovers over my head.

  Then I reach down my boxers. I’m half hard. Have I been half hard—a quarter hard?—this whole time? How long has it been hard? Since Angus kissed me? Since he woke me up?

  Doesn’t matter. It’s all the way hard now, so I take care of it, like I normally do. The normal way, the normal things I want to think about. About girls I’d liked. Porn I’d seen. Tits in my face. Pussy. Being pussy stupid.

  But I’m the one who’s stupid. Stupid for doing that with Angus. Angus and his bandanna. Angus and his mouth. His hand on my chest. All the things I don’t want to think about, but am thinking about, anyway, until I come, things I’m thinking about afterward too, all through wiping myself down, because I’m not gay but what choice do I have, to spend the night of my first kiss just exactly like that.

  TWO

  THE NEXT MORNING, my mom is all up in my business, wanting to gab at me. My brains are sizzling inside my head, and she’s asking do I want French toast. Kinney and Taylor are buzzing around the table where I’m sitting, trying to act normal even though I feel like I want to die. My mom has on the radio, some talk program. My mom always gets this way when Jay’s out of town; she’s saying, as Kinney and Taylor dance in and out of the room, that Jay’s been gone over a week and she’s going a little nuts having the girls on her own.

  “Right,” I say, trying to smile as she pours orange juice. She’s in her yoga outfit, all purple and high-tech spandex, wearing her fitness watch, her ears plugged up with earbuds though I can’t imagine she’s listening to anything anymore. Not with the radio blasting like it is. My hair’s dripping over the collar of my shirt like cold-water torture. I’d made myself sit through a long shower, which I only took because it was the best way to get Kinney and Taylor the hell away from me.

  Kinney’s listening to her iPod (of course, all seven-year-olds require their own iPods) and singing along with music no one can hear, which could have been funny because of her terrible singing, but it’s so loud. Taylor’s on her iPad, drawing things with a little stylus, asking me what she should draw next. Taylor’s always asking that kind of thing: What should her video-game avatar be? What should she name her little cat guy in her comic strip? Should she draw a moon or a planet? I don’t get it. If she wants to be creative so bad, why the hell does she ask someone else to tell her what to do? I can’t think of anything that I could have less interest in. I can’t think, period.

  But I eat the French toast, slowly, so I won’t upset my already burning stomach, and I nod and let my mom ask me all her questions: Do I need some new shorts? Do I have the scratch-damage plan on my new glasses? Do I have a case for the glasses? Do I want to go camping with Jay?

  Answers given: No. No. Yes. Maybe. (But really? No.)

  “You feeling all right?” she asks.


  “Yeah, I’m just sore from the remodel stuff.”

  She fluffs my hair. Pushes it out of my eyes a little, which gives me a shiver. Like Angus’s hand on my scalp last night. I stand up and take my plate to the sink.

  “You want some Advil, maybe?” she asks.

  YES, I think. Why I’d waited to take anything like that, I don’t know. More proof that my brain is broken when I’m hungover. My mom’s quick with the remedies, that’s for sure. Whether you stain something on the floor mat of your car or have some weird allergy or need more vitamin D, she’s got just the thing for you. She’s kind of a whirlwind of products, my mom.

  I gulp the pills with the rest of my juice as she crosses her arms over her chest and stands there, looking at me.

  “Your dad doing okay?”

  Fuck. Not that again.

  “Yeah.”

  “Not drinking again? You’d tell me if he was, I know, but I can’t help asking. . . .”

  “No,” I say. Thinking of the beers he’s had every night after we finish working. Which isn’t the same, isn’t the thing she’s talking about. Because he’s handling it now. It’s not like before. Plus, we talked about it and he admitted he had been out of line. He knew he was fucking up; he knew I knew too, so he fixed it.

  “He’s doing just fine.”

  She looks at me like she wants to believe me but doesn’t. Like she feels sorry for me. I stare at her collarbones, the knobs under her neck sticking up through her purple yoga shirt. She wears a gold necklace with birds and gemstones on it, one for Taylor, one for Kinney. Jay gave it to her for Mother’s Day. I gave her a card. Because I never have any money. It wasn’t like I was going to ask her for money to buy her a Mother’s Day gift.

  “I gotta get going,” I say. And then I duck back to my room to collect my stuff. And then I wait until they’re all in the backyard, filling up the above-ground pool thing and yelling and Kinney screaming that her iPod can’t get wet and I slip out the front door to my car and drive back to Minneapolis.

  When I get back to my dad’s, he’s at home. Which is weird; lately he’s always running around, tracking down something on Craigslist. A bay window, a screen door, a set of kitchen cabinets. He’s always got something he’s chasing after and it’s never anywhere convenient. It’s always off in Victoria or Elk River or halfway to Rochester. So I’m surprised to see him sitting in the kitchen, eating waffles with Roy and Garrett.